The death of King Ludwig II

On a stormy June night in 1886, Bavaria’s fairytale king walked into Lake Starnberg with his psychiatrist, and neither of them came out alive. Suicide, the government said. I’ve never believed it.

LUDWIG II: Every time I stand in the throne room at Neuschwanstein, or watch the fountain go up at Linderhof, I end up thinking about the way it all ended. A king who spent his life building fantasy castles, declared mad by doctors who never examined him, locked up in a lakeside palace and found dead in the water the next evening, in a lake he could have walked out of.
I’ve always thought he was shot. So I’ve gone back through what’s actually known, the claims that have surfaced since, and the arguments on both sides. Here’s the story, and at the end, my theory of what really happened.

UNFINISHED: The throne room at Neuschwanstein, photographed in 1886, the year Ludwig died. The throne itself was never made. Picture: Joseph Albert, 1886

Five days in June

By 1886 Ludwig was deep in debt from his building projects, and his government wanted him gone. A report on his mental state was put together, largely from servants’ gossip, and in early June four psychiatrists signed it, declaring him incurably insane. None of them had examined him. Their leader, Dr Bernhard von Gudden, had met him once, twelve years earlier.
• 10 June. A government commission arrives at Neuschwanstein at 4am to depose him. Ludwig has been tipped off. Local police and loyal locals turn the commissioners back, and a baroness goes at them with her umbrella.
• 12 June. A second commission arrives. Ludwig is seized just after midnight, put in a carriage at 4am and driven to Berg Castle on the shore of Lake Starnberg, south of Munich. His uncle Luitpold becomes Prince Regent.
• 13 June, morning. Ludwig goes for a walk with Gudden, with two attendants following. It passes off calmly. Gudden reports that the king seems quite normal.
• 13 June, about 6pm. Ludwig asks Gudden for another walk along the shore. Gudden agrees, and tells the attendants not to come. They’re last seen at about 6.30pm, and are due back for dinner at 8.
• That night. A storm blows in. Staff search the grounds in the rain and dark for more than two hours. At around 10.30 to 11pm, both bodies are found in shallow water close to the shore. Ludwig’s watch has stopped at 6.54.

HIS FAVOURITE: Linderhof, the only one of his palaces Ludwig saw finished. Picture: Stu Anderson

The official story

The verdict was suicide. Ludwig, the story went, tried to drown himself, Gudden tried to stop him, and in the struggle the king overpowered and drowned his doctor before walking out into the lake. Gudden’s body did have injuries to the head and neck, and marks that some took for strangling.
But look at the rest of it. Ludwig was a strong swimmer and a very tall man, and he was found in water roughly waist deep. According to the accounts of the autopsy there was no water in his lungs. The autopsy itself spent its energy measuring his skull and brain to prove he was mad, and recorded no wounds. And during the whole crisis he had shown no sign of wanting to die. The suicide verdict also happened to be the most convenient one for the people who had just deposed him: a man who kills himself and his doctor is a man who was mad all along.

The case that he was shot

Ever since, stories have leaked out from the people around that night. None of them can be proved. But there are a lot of them, and they point the same way.
• The fisherman. Jakob Lidl was Ludwig’s personal fisherman. He left notes saying he was waiting with a boat to carry the king away, and that as Ludwig stepped towards it, a shot from the bank killed him. Lidl said the men involved in the search had been sworn to silence, and he kept quiet for years. A page of his notes was photographed and judged genuine by a handwriting expert in 1961, but the notebook itself later vanished.
• The coat. In the 1950s a countess, Josephine von Wrbna-Kaunitz, showed guests a grey coat she said Ludwig had worn that night. It had two holes in the back. A Munich banker, Detlev Utermöhle, said in 2007 that he saw it as a boy. The coat was lost when the countess died in a house fire in 1973.
• Another coat. In 2018 a 96-year-old man, Willy Beyhl, told a Munich paper that his father, a craftsman for the royal family and a First World War medic, identified two holes in the king’s coat as bullet holes. He said the coat and letters were burned in 1961.
• The sketch. The art historian Siegfried Wichmann said a drawing of the dead king showed blood running from his mouth, which he read as a sign of a gunshot to the chest. “This is blood from the lungs and there is no water in it,” he said.
• The reward. The palace administrator who brought the body out of the water was granted free lodging at Nymphenburg Palace for life soon afterwards. His great-grandson still has the deed. Was it hush money? Nobody can say.

HIDEAWAY: Ludwig’s mountain retreat on the Schachen, where he spent his birthdays. Picture: Stu Anderson

The case against

Every one of those stories is second-hand, told decades later, and the evidence has a habit of disappearing just before anyone can test it. The official autopsy found no wounds. The Wittelsbach family, who alone could allow the body in the crypt of St Michael’s Church in Munich to be examined, has refused, and prosecutors have declined to reopen the case.
Some serious historians think he did choose to die. The psychiatrist Heinz Häfner, who spent years in the archives, concluded that Ludwig wasn’t mad at all, and that his suicide was a clear-headed decision. He had seen what an asylum had done to his brother Otto, and preferred death. On that reading, Gudden probably tried to stop him and was knocked senseless in the struggle.

My theory: It was a terrible accident

I don’t think the government set out to murder its king. It had already won. Ludwig was deposed, locked up and labelled insane, and a quiet life in an asylum would have suited the new regime far better than a royal corpse.
But I do think he was trying to escape. Look at what he did that evening. He asked for a second walk, along the shore, and he made sure the attendants stayed behind. Lidl says he had a boat waiting. That makes sense of the shallow water, too: Ludwig wasn’t walking out into the lake to drown, he was wading out to a boat.
Gudden would have tried to stop him, and that explains Gudden’s injuries. The king was a huge, desperate man and his doctor was in his sixties. And the park was being watched. Guards had been posted to make sure the king didn’t get away. Somewhere on that shore, in failing light and with a storm coming, someone saw the deposed king getting away by boat, and fired.
That would explain everything else. It would explain the bodies in shallow water, the dry lungs and the oaths of silence. It would explain an autopsy that was busy measuring skulls, the coats with holes in the back, and the rewards for the men who pulled the bodies out. A king killed by his own guards the day after he was deposed would have been a catastrophe for the new government. A mad king who drowned himself and his doctor was a tragedy that proved it had been right all along. One of those stories could be told. The other had to disappear.
Was it murder? I doubt it. I think it was one panicked shot, followed by a cover-up that has lasted for 140 years. Until the Wittelsbachs let someone look at the body, nobody will know for sure, and maybe that’s just how Ludwig would have wanted it. “I want to remain an eternal mystery,” he once wrote, “to myself and to others.”

Visiting the place where he died

A simple cross stands in the shallows of Lake Starnberg at Berg, on the east shore, where the king’s body was found. A few metres up the slope is the Votivkapelle, a memorial chapel his uncle Luitpold had built between 1896 and 1900 by the same architects who worked on Neuschwanstein. It was consecrated on 13 June 1900, the 14th anniversary of his death. It’s open from April to October, Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 6pm, though you can only look in through the grille. Berg Castle itself is a private home, still owned by the Wittelsbachs.
• Getting there. Take the S6 S-Bahn from Munich to Starnberg, at the head of the lake. Berg is on the east shore, a lakeside walk or a short ride away. By car it’s 35 to 45 minutes from Munich.
• His grave. Ludwig lies in the crypt of St Michael’s Church on Neuhauser Strasse, in the middle of Munich.
• Further reading. Heinz Häfner, Ein König wird beseitigt (2008), the scholarly case that he wasn’t mad. Peter Glowasz, Wurde Ludwig II erschossen? (1995), the case for a shooting.
Checked October 2026.

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